Book Review

  • Darwinia, Robert Charles Wilson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 1998 (1999 reprint), 372 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-812-56662-9

    This is a weird book, and this will be a weird review.

    For the biggest element of Darwinia -its biggest surprise, its biggest flaw, its biggest virtue- is structural. Just mentioning its existence is in itself a spoiler. For Darwinia is book that start out being one story, and then ends up being a totally different story.

    As the book begins, something dreadful happens to Europe. The old continent is… replaced by something straight out of an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel; a strange land roughly similar from a geological point of view, but with a completely different ecology. Of course, all previous traces of humanity have disappeared.

    Eight years later, a young photographer named Guiford Law embarks for the old/new continent of Darwinia. After leaving his wife and child in the brand-new settlement of New London, the expedition of which he is part go deep in the mainland, where they’ll find—

    Well, they don’t find anything as much as something find them, but that distinction is moot given that this is the moment where the book changes gears on the reader and a whole new paradigm is imposed on us.

    It’s not exactly that the new paradigm does not work, because it does (and it does work better than the promise shown by the first half of the book), but rather because it is insufficiently integrated with the rest of the book. Darwinia‘s first 140 pages is a drawn-out narrative detailing Guilford’s expedition. The rest of the book is much more free-ranging, skipping across years and events in a blink and presenting a fragmented view of the story that doesn’t mesh with the slow-paced beginning.

    Then, of course, the story moves in a direction that is both interesting, yet ill-suited to Wilson’s writing style. He is too pondered, too atmospheric to deal with a The Stand type of story. He can’t build a good-versus-evil epic with vignettes. While the latter part of the novel shows promise and delivers satisfaction, the mind boggles at what another author would have been able to do with Wilson’s premise.

    (A few readers will recognize that Darwinia’s latter part seems to have been inspired by Frank Tippler’s The Physics of Immortality, though much better handled that some other recent similarly-themed SF like Pohl’s Eschcaton trilogy. It’s also no small wonder if Darwinia also shares significant similarities with his own Hugo-nominated story “Divided by Infinity”, recently published in Starlight 2.)

    The result, as the introduction to this review makes clear, is very weird; the kind of novel critics like to give A- for effort and C for execution. Darwinia is an interesting half-success, for it shows how difficult it is to build a successful novel. It’s not enough to have a good ideas (or, in this case, two good ideas), and a few good characters. It’s not enough to be able to write well. It’s not enough to be able to put your characters though difficult times. You also have to do it consistently for a whole 300-pages book, and that takes some work. That’s something that few people will notice when it’s done well, but that everyone will criticize if it’s not entirely successful.

  • Alpha Centauri, William Barton and Michael Capobianco

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Avon/EOS, 1997 (1998 reprint), 438 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-380-78205-7

    Science-Fiction used to be devoid of sex. Aimed at a teen market and conscious that any risqué content could provoke a backlash from parental authorities, magazine SF was kept suggestive, but mostly clean. While often ludicrous, this wholesome spirit helped the genre mature intellectually, a lot like the teens who were reading the magazines.

    Things changed in the sixties, with new authors and new markets. For the first time, SF was a genre that could be sold in books, and with this new readership (well, often the same readership, but now older) came the freedom to experiment with new things. Including sex.

    The so-called “New Wave” not only brought a new writing style to SF, but also added a sexual dimension to characters, who could now consume their lust after triumphing from impossible odds. A few writers never caught on; some succeeded brilliantly.

    And so SF evolved.

    Or devolved, according to some. The plain good old wholesome field of SF was now awash in sexual perversions and evil thoughts. The old stuff was clean, PG-rated and completely safe for children. The new stuff was decidedly different.

    Today, things are more balanced: While the newness of perversion has worn off, characters haven’t gone back to their eunuch selves. SF is now comparable to mainstream literature (and considerably tamer than romance!) in terms of sexual content. But there are occasionally a few novels that bring back all the excesses of the sixties, making readers and reviewers question the appropriateness of SF’s sexual revolution.

    Alpha Centauri manages to ruin a potent Science-Fiction novel with incessant sex… and that takes some (misguided) talent. What could have initially been a reasonably good and original novel about humans exploring Alpha Centauri is now peppered with thoroughly unpleasant sexual issues.

    Now, your reviewer isn’t a stranger to porn, but only the sickest wacko could find arousing material in Alpha Centauri. One character is of both sexes, and he’s the healthiest psyche aboard. Another has been ritually abused by her own family as a child. Another is psychologically programmed to have sex with every crewmember in order to infect them with a sterility-inducing virus. Another is insanely jealous. Another has affective disorders. Quite a bunch of dysfunctional astronauts for a single mission.

    All of which, still, could have been handled in a mature fashion. But not with Barton and Capobianco: At almost every single page, the sexual dimension of the story is brought up. Again. Again. Again, until the frustrated reader can’t do anything but scream out “Enough, already!” Every single character in Alpha Centauri is obsessed with sex, and most of this obsession is definitely not healthy, enjoyable or even necessary. Sex is pain. Sex is anguish. Sex is death. Sex is everywhere.

    Yes, there’s another story in Alpha Centauri, about a bunch of human discovering a fallen extraterrestrial civilization on Alpha Centauri, and them using hyper-advanced technology to reconstruct images of them, but you have to wade though pages of unpleasantness to discover it. And when you do, it’s only to find out that the aliens are at least as seriously screwed up -in, yes, a sexual sense- as the humans of the story.

    In the end, Alpha Centauri isn’t completely worthless, for it teaches an interesting insight in the workings of SF. If sex remained taboo for so long, and isn’t that important even today, it’s not because SF-fans were immature, because sex is immoral or because editors were prudes: It’s because sex bogs down a story and teaches nothing new. It hinders SF’s natural strengths and annoys the reader.

    Got that, author-boys?

  • Biohazard: The Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World, Ken Alibek with Stephen Handelman

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Random House, 1999, 319 pages, C$37.95 hc, ISBN 0-375-50231-9

    It’s one thing to read a thriller about a mad bio-terrorist planning an attack on a major American city. It’s entirely another to read an autobiography by someone whose job was to do such things.

    Ken Alibek -born Kanatjan Alibekov- was born in Kazakhstan in 1950 and joined Biopreparat (a pseudo-pharmaceutical soviet company that was really the USSR’s biological weapon program) in 1975. He quickly ascended the echelons of the program, developing strains of smallpox, anthrax and other tasty treats. He became Biopreparat’s deputy director in 1988. His dissatisfaction with the aims of bio-weaponry and with the state of things in a post-cold-war Russia lead to his defection to the United States in 1992. Biohazard is his autobiography, and it makes for fascinating reading.

    Biological warfare is a type of weapon that no self-respecting nation should contemplate using. Indeed, a treaty banning their usage was signed in 1972. Convinced that the United States was using the Treaty as cover to hide their operations, the USSR immediately strengthened Biopreparat—thus bringing Alibek in their program. In the 1990s, however, several Russians became convinced that there was no such thing as an American bio-warfare program. Alibek even describes an inspection visit in December 1991, where his group of top-notch bio-warfare experts failed to detect any sign of American bio-weapons.

    The collapse of the USSR has been remarkable in that it has allowed a flood of hitherto top-secret information to reach civilian ears. Most of what is told in Biohazard is so unprecedented that it would have been heavily protected by intelligence agencies not even ten years ago. Alibek’s picture of Soviet bio-weapon programs is so complete that the reader doesn’t once doubt the authenticity of his subject.

    And what a subject it is: The USSR had perfected the bulk manufacturing of diseases, calmly packaging them in “delivery vectors” in a decidedly industrial fashion. Far gone were the old-style witches’ brew: what replaced it was a diabolically efficient wholesale process of disease manufacturing. KGB agents across the world were collecting strange diseases, sending them to Biopreparat, which isolated the strain and found out how to mass-replicate it. Workers infected by disease ran the risk of seeing their remains being ghoulishly exploited for a stronger strain of the disease. [P-126-133]

    Reading Alibek is an experience that goes beyond simple scientific or military relevance, for his narrative is the closest that one can approach to the mindset of the “mad scientist” of so many bad novels. Alibek, “the inventor of the world’s most powerful anthrax”, calmly describes the process in which he was an integral part. He’s inordinately proud of his accomplishment; he may not agree with the end result, but it was a job well done. He was following orders… and we know where that might have led.

    Still, despite a rather unusual subject matter and narrator, Biohazard has its flaws. The structure isn’t coherent, jumping all over Alibek’s history. The ghostwriter’s style is competent but pedestrian, contenting itself with basic journalistic prose without embellishments. Fortunately, a good index completes the book.

    Still, for fans of Douglas Preston’s The Cobra Event, for cold war buffs, for bio-warfare doomsayers, for readers interested in a bit of real-life thrills, Biohazard delivers on its promise. Just remember: It’s not fiction. Alibek’s neat little plagues still exist.

  • Heart of the Comet, Gregory Benford and David Brin

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 1986, 468 pages, C$21.95 hc, ISBN 0-553-05125-3

    The passage of Halley Comet in 1986 was, to the layman, almost the definition of a non-event: It passed too far away from Earthy to be easily visible to the naked eye and all the media build-up was reduced to naught. (Fortunately, ten years later, the spectacular Hyakutake comet proved to be far more spectacular, satisfying all of us “once-in-a-lifetime” astronomical freaks.) Still, Halley provided a reasonably good excuse to vulgarize information about some of the solar system’s most fascinating subject.

    In 1985-1986 -probably envisioning a truckload of media-derived money- hard-SF authors David Brin and Gregory Benford collaborated on a themed novel titled Heart of the Comet. Even though the result didn’t set the world of SF on fire, it still proves to be a reasonable read even more than a decade later.

    The novel follows three characters as they embark upon a massive expedition on Halley. Far from being a joy-ride, this scientific mission aims to stay on Halley for a complete 76-years orbit. The story begins in 2061 as the hundreds of scientists, engineers and other personnel attached to the Halley mission board the comet and burrow inside in an effort to make themselves at home. Everything seems to be working for a while, until the colony faces the first of the innumerable dangers of the voyage…

    The scope of Heart of the Comet is large enough to satisfy most readers, spanning more than fifty years and the whole solar system. The novel plays with most of Science-Fiction’s usual devices, from space exploration (naturally) to artificial intelligence, body modification, longevity, etc… It’s a Big SF Book, and nearly succeeds as such.

    Given the academic pedigree of both co-authors, it’s no surprise to find out that the science of Heart of the Comet is reasonably exact, or convincingly faked. No faster-than-light gizmos, but plenty of paragraphs of we-did-our-research information on comets. A few welcome diagrams and plans punctuate the book, providing occasionally very helpful ancillary material.

    Unfortunately, the book proves to be less successful outside the realm of straight scientific knowledge: Several annoying SF clichés are used without apology, and the result diminishes the impact of the book. The most egregious is the character of Saul Bellows, who proves to be not only a scientist on the order of Newton and Einstein combined, but also the co-father of genetically-enhanced human group and an immortal. (!) Though it’s certainly handy to have someone like this around, it strains credulity to use such a character as a universal solution. The treatment of the AI is also weak, bringing little of importance to the plot besides a happy (deus-ex-machina, literally) ending. There’s yet-another-war-between-humans-and-superhuman. The oh-so-bad “irrational” religious sects also make a wholly expected appearance. You gnash your teeth in frustration at a the characters’ blockheadedness.

    But if it’s a comet SF story you want, then this is what Heart of the Comet delivers. A decently enjoyable mix of hard-SF and gritty adventure. You could do worse than pick up this book. At nearly 500 pages, chances are that it’ll last until your next peek at a comet.

  • Et Tu, Babe, Mark Leyner

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harmony, 1992, 168 pages, C$21.50 hc, ISBN 0-517-58335-6

    On the reviewing slate today: Funny weird stuff from 1992.

    Captain Jack Zodiac begins as Cliff Koussevisky wakes up in the morning. His daughter is still missing, lost in the mall as a disembodied ghostly presence. His son is a space cadet. One of his neighbor battles a carnivorous lawn. Another neighbor has become an invincible superhero. Cliff wants to marry Marsha, but Marsha’s Jewish mother objects, and ever though she’s dead, her ghost can still wreak havoc on an ordinary household. The runaway hyper-inflation has everyone paying millions for engagement rings. The Russians start World War III. The traffic is literal murder. And as if that wasn’t enough, there’s a garbage strike.

    Et Tu, Babe‘s premise is most neatly stated on the book’s dust jacket: “In 1990, following the publication of his extraordinary first novel… Mark Leyner was hailed by [numerous magazines] as ‘the cult author of the 1990s.’ Tragically for Leyner, the acclaim and publicity were too much for the young author, irreparably loosening his grip on reality.” The book is a portrait of the author-as-mega-pop-star, presenting a larger-than-life portrait of Mark Leyner, über-macho-icon. He’s got tattoos on his internal organs, holds writing workshops to exterminate potential rivals, performs his own appendicectomy and gets high on a whiff of Abraham Lincoln’s morning breath.

    As I said, weird stuff. From 1992.

    Captain Jack Zodiac is the first book I’ve read from Kandel, but if it’s any indication, it certainly won’t be the last. It’s preciously rare to find something as perversely funny as a book like this, so consider this review as an exhortation to track down this book. If nothing else, you’ll meet Bob Petruzzo, whose lawn is about to take its revenge for years of torture.

    It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense at first. Multiple threads are introduced, and one begins to wonder if they’re even taking place in the same universe. But as the book advances, things cohere and the nice thing about Captain Jack Zodiac is that it is coherent without having to make sense. When the ending arrives -kind of THE MATRIX as written by Douglas Adams,- it feels as if it’s too soon, that things were just getting started! Progressing steadily from suburban satire to metaphysical trip, this novel shouldn’t be missed.

    Most of the same comments also hold true for Mark Lerner’s Et Tu, Babe, though Leyner’s humour is far more risqué than Michael Kandel. Leyner’s alter-ego thinks of himself as the epitome of maleness and his obsession tends to run into narcissistic bodybuilding quasi-erotica. Digressions in self-performed appendicectomy and visceral tattoos are also prone to annoy certain weak-stomached readers. But otherwise, Et Tu, Babe is a wonderfully megalomaniac work, just sufficiently warped enough to avoid upsetting the inferior reader with the thunder of his greatness.

    The style is crunchily macho, with Leyner killing most of the rock-star-eccentricities clichés by one-upping them once more. The variety of styles and approaches to the material (pseudo-interviews, news-segment transcriptions, fiction excerpts, etc…) keeps the humor fresh and unexpected. It’s often a laugh-aloud riot. A common failing of most humor writing is the tendency to run too long after the punchline, but here one fells almost disappointed that Et Tu, Babe doesn’t run even longer. What will it take to bring back Mark Leyner?

  • Trouble and her Friends, Melissa Scott

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 1994, 379 pages, C$31.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-85733-0

    Has it already been five years since the end of cyberpunk? Even though only half a decade passed between the release of Trouble and her Friends and me reading it, this novel seems much more dated than even works from the eighties.

    The plot is unmistakably cyberpunk as we know it: A hacker retires after the adoption of some stringent anti-hacking laws, leaving her lover as easily as she leaves her old job. A few years later, another hacker steals her name (“Trouble”) and attracts unhealthy attention from authorities, who think it’s the old Trouble who’s doing the jobs. Now Trouble must ally herself with her old lover in order to catch the hacker who stole her name…

    Beyond the “closing off the wild west” atmosphere, there’s not much new or innovative here. (Any SF novel blurb beginning triumphantly by “In less than a hundred years from now” is hopelessly naive) Compounding the problem of staleness is that Scott is content with recycling the cyberpunk clichés without modification. Of course, the weather is screwed up. Of course, cyberspace is a three-dimensional virtual area filled with colorful shapes. Of course the best hackers plug themselves in the matrix with a direct neural interface. Of course, the big corporations are evil and scheme against governments. Or course… Trouble and her Friends has fewer relevance to the real-world than to the cyberpunk universe first defined by Gibson and his acolytes. Unfortunately, most readers have been there before to see the same things.

    No doubt that fans of the book will herald Scott’s usage of lesbian protagonists as “fresh and innovative”, but is it, really? Sexual definition was a staple of cyberpunk (with the real/online identity dichotomy) well before Trouble and her Friends. And the original cyberpunks had at least more subtlety than to underline their characters with heavy-handed “Boo-hoo, we’re gays and everyone hates us” gloom. (Missing the point that in cyberpunk novels everyone hates each other.)

    Scott also mixes feminism in her ideological viewpoint… which would have been fine if she hadn’t also underlined the idea with big honking “SEXUAL DISCRIMINATION!” authorial messages everywhere in the text. Generally, I find progressive messages more efficient when presented in a matter-of-fact fashion, not the strident “We’re persecuted! You’re Nazis!” wailing tone of Trouble and her Friends. Scott tries to have it both ways by presenting a far-away future with yesterday’s prejudices.

    Said far-away (late twenty-first century) future become even more ridiculous when the technologies used are already so primitive compared to what we’re anticipating for the next decade. Obviously, Scott is more interested in relationship issues than coherent extrapolation.

    Which would have actually been fine if it hadn’t dragged down the narrative by at least two hundred extra pages. For its length, not a lot happens in Trouble and her Friends. It takes a long time for the novel to get moving, and sagacious readers will find themselves skimming over the reams of monotonous prose that’s simply not worth the trouble: Scott ain’t Gibson and this is a wannabee net-novel with your grandma’s writing style on Prozac.

    Still, even despite the unsubtle sexual politics, dated future, unoriginal extrapolation and stuffy prose, Trouble and her Friends isn’t all that bad. Readers of the genre will recognize the place: Kind of a lesbian SF Harlequin. With appropriate skimming, a fun read for a rainy Saturday afternoon.

  • Bloom, Wil McCarthy

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Del Rey, 1998, 310 pages, C$24.00 hc, ISBN 0-345-40857-8

    Many Science Fiction authors are said to be heir to the grandmasters of the field. People are constantly trying to find “the Next Heinlein”, with the mantle passing from author to author, stopping by such choices as Spider Robinson, John Varley and John Barnes. Wil McCarthy hasn’t widely been recognized as the successor of any Grandmaster, but with Bloom, he evokes fond memories of Arthur C. Clarke’s best travelogues.

    Indeed, Bloom begins on Ganymede, an orbit away from Imperial Earth‘s Titan. But where Clarke traveled through a solar system dominated by humans, McCarthy has a much weirder -and dangerous- future in mind.

    By design or accident, some nano-critter (“mycora”) has managed to eat Earth in classic gray goo fashion. A small fraction of the human population managed to escape on the moon, and then farther out beyond the asteroid belt when it became obvious that mycora was also taking over the entire inner system. So Bloom opens on a solar system whose inner planets are all inhospitable and where humans are holed up here and there in the outer planets. Still, there are occasional incursions of mycora in the human settlements. There much be fought decisively, or else the bloom replicates until it destroys the habitat.

    In the middle of all this, high authorities decide that mycora has to be studied, so they send a starship in the inner system, ostensibly to drop off sensors. Our viewpoint character is John Strasheim, part-time journalist and full-time shoe manufacturer. He’s not the only one to ask himself what he’s doing with the spacemen and scientists making up the remainder of the crew. As they set out for their trip to the inner system, -battling the constant threat of spaceship bloom- the question of whether they can all be trusted is raised, and then precipitated.

    The atmosphere of constant paranoia -both external and internal- is part of what makes Bloom so special. The constant threat of mycora when the expedition enters the inner space system is convincingly claustrophobic, creating a real sense of dread for the characters. All of this leads to a few efficient sequences of almost pure terror as all hope seems to be lost and the crew has to fight a seemingly invincible array of threats.

    McCarthy sets up his world and his characters effectively, leading up to some interesting situations. The characterization is only adequate, however, as it does take some time to differentiate between the small cast of characters and even then they never really become fully realized. No matter; they’re still serviceable in the usual SF fashion.

    There are a lot of cool gadgets in Bloom, (like the tickle implant and the fear dolls) and McCarthy is scientifically-literate, so the jargon sounds right. Though not exactly an ultra-hard-SF novel, Bloom does play according to the rules of the genre, and is more convincing because of it. It simply makes sense, even in the action scenes.

    Better yet is the simple, direct and enjoyable prose style of the book. The viewpoint character is a part-time journalist used to writing for a layman audience, and the narrative reflects this superbly. Especially fascinating are the snippets of text sent by Stratheim, balancing humor and fear. (Or unsent; see Chapter 19) The book is compulsively readable… a civilian’s account of combat in deep territory, a Science-Fiction version of APOCALYPSE NOW.

    But like APOCALYPSE NOW it’s a slight shame if the conclusion is so disappointing. It would have been interesting to see McCarthy do something more with this predictable finale. As it stands, it’s almost as if McCarthy shies away from really interesting revelations.

    Still, Bloom is a pretty good SF novel. Fans of McCarthy won’t be disappointed by this, his best novel so far, and non-fans might take this opportunity to discover an interesting author. A worthwhile choice for a fun, quick, thoughtful and interesting read… just like the best Clarke novels. Definitely a 1998 core-SF essential.

  • Labyrinth of Night, Allen Steele

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 1992, 340 pages, C$5.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-441-46741-5

    Some books are sold by their cover illustration.

    I had been fascinated by Labyrinth of Night‘s cover art ever since I first saw it in a book collection of Bob Eggleton’s paintings. It shows, in warm reds and oranges, human astronauts peering over a Martian landscape complete with pyramids and human face sculpted into rock. Never mind that all that Cydonia stuff is silly beyond belief; the cover illustration was lovely.

    Both halves of the novel begin after the initial awed look at Cydonia. Humans have investigated the site, and found an interior labyrinth of deadly puzzles. The last one isn’t about mathematics or physics, but about music… and so authorities draft one rebel musician to come investigate. While he isn’t too pleased to make the Earth/Mars trip, everyone else has bigger problems as things are heating up on Mars between the Russian and the American military forces.

    This first part of the novel uses standard narrative segments intercut with pseudo-journalistic excerpts as Steele’s universe is introduced to the reader. This device disappears in the latter part of the book, which takes place two years later and could easily constitute a standalone novel by itself. Though Labyrinth of Night isn’t a fixup, it does feel like an expansion of an original novella. One could quibble with Steele’s unconvincing characterization of military personnel and his knee-jerk antigovernementalism, but the result is still decent hard-SF reading, and that is not something to be dismissed lightly.

    Clarke Country, Space doesn’t have the benefit of an eye-popping cover, but holds up fairly well on its own. It was published before Labyrinth of Night and technically presents anterior events, though there is not direct link between the two novels. (Even so, a single line in Labyrinth of Night pretty much sums up the aftermath of Clarke County, Space though the event described doesn’t happen in the earlier novel.)

    Clarke County is a space colony, comfortably hosting humanity’s first extraterrestrial community. Discounting the occasional Church of Elvis convention, things are going pretty well. But as it all too often happens with these space colonies, some think that independence would be a Really Good idea… So what do we expect to read? Another Independence-war-story in space, right?

    Wrong! For all its setup, back cover blurb and front-cover slogan (“It’s a piece of the sky worth fighting for”), Clarke County, Space ends up being a novel about a mafia assassin pursuing his victim on a space colony, and the Navajo sheriff tracking down the killer. Unexpected, isn’t it? This novel reads a lot like the first part of Labyrinth of Night, a fast-paced prologue to something bigger. But as most Steele fans know, this shouldn’t be interpreted as a rejection; Clarke County, Space is a good read in its own right, with plenty of bigger throwaway pieces cheerfully handed out to the reader in the framing story.

    As always, readers of Allen Steele novels can expect some fast-paced adventures, told in a clear and enjoyable prose. Both Clarke County, Space and Labyrinth of Night show very well the strengths (and weaknesses) of this underappreciated hard-SF practitioner.

  • A Good, Old-Fashioned Future, Bruce Sterling

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 1999, 279 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-57642-9

    Readers already familiar with Bruce Sterling’s brand of Science-Fiction should smile at the misleading title of his latest short story collection. Because if Sterling is famous for something, it’s definitely not for writing “good, old-fashioned” futures.

    One only has to take a look at his third novel, Schismatrix (1985) to see the first glimpses of a major talent at representing new and unsettling vistas. Schismatrix was a bold departure for hard-SF at the time, presenting a future that was eerie yet believable, but never too comfortable. His latter novels fulfilled this early promise, from the globe-spanning Island in the Net (1987) to the political satire of Distraction (1998). Sterling was heavily associated with cyberpunk in the eighties, but metastased in the “Wired” crowd during the nineties, constantly staying abreast of the latest trends and technologies.

    A Good, Old-Fashioned Future is his third short story collection, and in some ways the best. Unlike Crystal Express, this collection represents Sterling working on his best playground, the globalized, info-rich, chaotic future of true tomorrow. Unlike other authors content to re-use standard SF devices to build up futures more related to past SF than present reality, Sterling is constantly original. The stories in this collection are usually sufficiently well-written to stay interesting all the way through, which wasn’t necessarily the case with his previous collections. Sterling’s narrative gifts are steadily improving, and with this collection he delivers a book that’s simultaneously interesting, colorful, literate and readable.

    The Hugo-nominated “Maneki Neko” introduces Sterling’s techno-vision particularly well. Here, the net has given rise to a “gift economy” that is undemanding, yet particularly powerful. You might not think too much of doing “one small favor”, but the chain of events set in motion by a series of small coordinated event is irresistible. What if every stranger you met did you some small annoyance… wouldn’t that be an unbearable day? This story -possibly the strongest of the collection- is a good old crunchy SF idea wrapped in some of the best stylistic packaging you’ll find.

    “Big Jelly”, a collaboration with Rudy Rucker, is less enjoyable, as if the sort-of-satire and the light subject matter somehow couldn’t be nailed down by the writing. It’s still enjoyable as a parody of infotech venture capitalism, but not much more. It ends in mid-story.

    “The Littlest Jackal” is almost a present-day story in terms of technology, but it plays with new sociopolitical ideas and manages to be enjoyable despite its lack of cohesion. The ending is also a problem, but the story isn’t bad. Rumor has it that Sterling’s next novel will take place in this particular “universe”.

    “Sacred Cow” is the weakest story of the volume, being neither particularly incisive nor innovative. Rambling and pointless but still readable, proving that even at his worst, Sterling still turns out worthwhile material.

    The last three novella-length stories form a loose trilogy. “Deep Eddie” is about the adventures of an American courier in Europe, where he’s dragged into a curious conflict between intellectuals, a confrontation that quickly heats up and becomes very physical. “Bicycle Repairman” is about a mechanic who finds himself the target of a government agent when he comes into possession of a subversive television decoder. The last story of the volume is “Taklamakan”, an atmospheric -but curiously unsatisfying- trip inside a closed-off top-secret facility.

    A Good Old-Fashioned Future delivers no less than four Hugo-nominated and two Hugo-winning stories (“Bicycle Repairman” and “Taklamakan”)… so there’s some quality to the mix. But the high price of the book coupled with the disappointing number of stories (Seven!) doesn’t make it a necessary buy. A good choice for Hugo completists and confirmed Sterling fans, but a library loan for everyone else.

  • The Martians, Kim Stanley Robinson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 1999, 336 pages, C$35.95 hc, ISBN 0-553-80117-1

    All fans of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, please stand up and be counted. Now allow me to explain how the very number of you standing up constitutes an irresistible moneymaking opportunity.

    By Science-Fiction standards, the Mars trilogy was an enormously successful work, both popularly, critically and financially. All the books of the series won either the Hugo or the Nebula award and the paperback editions of the book are all well into further printings. All books were bestsellers and have already attained something akin to classical status.

    Which, of course, makes it irresistible for both publisher and author to milk out an little “extra”. The Martians is the first such extra, a 336-pages book that brings together several short pieces related to the Mars trilogy. You’ll find here a few short stories, essays, vignettes, poems…

    The book starts with “Michel in Antarctica”, a pre-history of the Mars trilogy that ultimately veers in alternate history. This particular parallel world is further explored in “Michel in Provence”, though -unfortunately- no more.

    Other pieces bring back the characters of the trilogy, often illuminating earlier actions, or simply presenting maybe outtakes from the original text. So we get “Maya and Desmond”, “Coyote Makes Trouble”, “Jackie on Zo”, “Keeping the Flame”, “Coyote Remembers” and “Sax Moments”.

    The Martians reprints two of Robinson’s pre-Red Mars Mars stories, “Exploring Fossil Canyon” and the lengthy novella “Green Mars”. Both of these stories are part of an alternate mini-cycle further explored here with “Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars” (a slight, but fun story about Martian baseball), “What Matters” and “A Martian Romance”.

    There are also a few unconnected short stories here and there, including “Saving Noctis Dam”, “Sexual Dismorphism” and “Enough is as Good as a Feast”. We get twice as many unconnected vignettes, some evocative and some decidedly less so.

    There are also a few pieces commenting on the trilogy, whether it’s “The Constitution of Mars” (annotated), “The Sountrack”, selected poems (including one called “A Report on the First Recorded Case of Areophagy”) and a final poignant piece titled “Purple Mars”, where Robinson may describe his last day of work on the Mars trilogy.

    The result is both more and less of what we expected. On one hand, it is a worthwhile companion to the Mars trilogy, presenting more of what made the trilogy so popular. On the other hand, it doesn’t present what would have been interesting to see in a companion volume: Non-fiction essays on the conception, the writing, the revision of the series. Original plans. Maps and drafts. More substantial side-stories. As such, it almost approaches the “let’s dump cut scenes in the marketplace” approach.

    But really, The Martians couldn’t be anything but a disappointment for fans of the trilogy, knowing that this is pretty much the last of what Robinson has to say about the place. As such, it’s a fitting -if uneven- tribute. Non-fans already suspect that they shouldn’t begin here, but fans should be advised that The Martians is a decent sideshow to the main event.

  • Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia, Gregory Benford

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bard Avon, 1999, 225 pages, C$26.00 hc, ISBN 0-380-97537-8

    We human critters have a few deficiencies, and one of them is certainly our lack of capacity for long-term planning. Try as we might, our day-to-day combat through life almost invariably relates to the next meal, the next paycheck, the next project, the next summer vacations.

    The problem is not as much with human individuals, but with the realization that no one else is making long-term planning either. Organized groups usually think too much in terms of upcoming elections, end-quarter results or continued sources of funding to be concerned about long-term perspectives. This is not exactly a bad thing (given the rate of technological and social change, most plans will crumble at long range anyway) but it can certainly become a problem in a few situations.

    Deep Time, by noted scientist and SF author Gregory Benford, takes a look at a few concerns that will require more than our usual attention span. In the process, he raises some fundamental issues about the environment, technical progress, civilization lifespan and how even long-term science is conducted by short-term humans. The book is divided in four parts:

    The first segment begins as Benford is asked to be part of a study team, mandated by the American Congress, to study ways of ensuring that nuclear waste sites will remain undisturbed for more than the 10,000 years required for their degradation to harmless levels. Putting “Dangerous stuff; keep out!” signs obviously won’t do, especially when we consider that 10,000 years is lengthier than the span of recorded human history. Benford’s team had to consider such cheery subjects as complete civilizational collapse, language drift, evolving digging technologies, relic hunters, etc… The team ended up proposing massive, eerie sculptural features, multiple-language messages with iconographic support and a host of other neat features. This is by far the most fascinating piece of the book.

    The second quarter concerns the efforts of a group of scientists to compose an “ultimate” message-to-others to be carried on the Cassini space probe. Though most of us are familiar with the gold plaque loaded on the Voyager probes, this was meant to be an updated version of this effort. Unfortunately, even though an interesting message was developed, the effort was doomed and replaced by a politically-neutral DVD containing an utterly meaningless list of names…

    [March 2009: I wrote this review in 1999 and, along the way, touched upon a conflict between Gregory Benford and Carolyn Porco described in the book’s “Vaults in Vacuum” chapter. In September 2002, Carolyn Porco wrote to me to explain that she disagreed with her characterization in Benford’s book and allowed me to post a few corrections. In March 2009, Gregory Benford wrote to me to explain that he disagreed with the corrections and suggested corrections of his own.

    You know what? Life is too short, I respect both Benford and Porco (from afar) too much, and I’m too ignorant of the matters discussed to try to abitrate. All three of us have better things to do. So I have removed both the original content and the corrections (the most curious of you know where to go to find the archives), and would rather leave you with the smartest thing I’ve learned from this decade-long episode. In the (last) words of Carolyn Porco:

    Next time, reserve judgement until you’ve met and spoken to the individuals involved.

    The book become less interesting as Benford gets on a high environmental soapbox in the last half of the book. The third part still turns around a worthwhile idea, as Benford tells of his proposition to build a “Library of Life”, a repository of DNA from most of today’s species of plants and animals threatened by extinction. Though not a startlingly original project, Benford uses this as a springboard to other related subjects (conservationism, taxonomy, scientific politics, etc…).

    But the fourth quarter grates as it veers off in a well-intentioned, but strikingly unoriginal rant about how humanity is already sending deep-time messages by environment degradation. Though Benford keeps things interesting with little-known facts, the impression left by this section is one of déjà-vu: Not exactly why one would pick up the book in the first place.

    Additionally, Benford leaves out an important part of any deep time projection: The very real possibility of increased lifespans and of political stabilization. While this isn’t a flaw by itself, this omission does get a bit suspicious after the umpteenth time Benford talk about short human lives. Wouldn’t longevity undermine his thesis? Maybe…

    Still, despite a rather heavy-handed environmentalist screed in the second half of the book, Benford keeps thing interesting, and Deep Time fulfills the goal of any decent non-fiction science vulgarization: Make us discover thing we didn’t know before. Or cared about.

  • MTV: The Making of a Revolution, Tom McGrath

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Running Press, 1996, 208 pages, C$22.95 hc, ISBN 1-56138-703-7

    If ever some future historians decide to study my life in detail, they’ll probably abandon before my twenty-fifth birthday out of terminal boredom. They’ll quickly conclude that I missed out on sex, drugs and most of rock’n’roll. It speaks volume that I’ve never seen a straight ten minute of MTV, and that was an accident. For all their much-vaunted influence, MTV and its Canadian equivalents (MuchMusic and MusiquePlus) are remarkably easy to avoid if you don’t have cable.

    And yet, even I can’t argue with the impact of MTV and video clips. From the business side of things, it has produced a discontinuity in the way popular music is marketed. There is very literally a pre-MTV and a post-MTV era as far as selling pop music is defined. Before, you produced some songs, played them on the radio and hoped for the best. Now, with the artist in everyone’s home through video clips, the image is an integral part of the process. Is it any wonder that pop-phenomenons like the Spice Girls and the Backstreet Boys can succeed today on unimaginative musical content? (Indeed, looking at today’s female singers, one can wonder if musical success is somehow genetically linked with attractiveness.)

    But the true measure of MTV’s success is that its influence has spread well beyond the confines of music: By linking image and song, it has also boldly redefined the audiovisual universe of popular culture. Squeezing a mini-story in four minutes require some compression, best achieved with quick cuts, fast-paced action beats and the avoidance of subtlety. Television quickly noticed that the same rules could also apply to longer lengths, as initially proven with “Miami Vice”. Cinema took longer to catch up, waiting for clip directors to helm full-length pictures, but when Hollywood noticed the phenomenon, it never looked back. Action films are now filmed like videoclips, their frenetic pacing appealing to jaded viewers. The biggest summer movie of 1998, -ARMAGEDDON, directed by former music-video director Michael Bay- was called “the first two-hours movie trailer” by top film critic Roger Ebert.

    MTV did this. MTV took popular culture by storm and single-handedly changed it beyond former recognition. That’s what Tom McGrath tells us in MTV: The Making of a Revolution. He goes beyond just a straight corporate history of the TV network and places it in context by linking it to other changes in the 1982-1993 timeframe. That’ how we end up not only with a book that decently traces MTV’s ascendancy, but also the associated fields of cable television (actually invented in the 1950s) and video clips.

    As could be expected, MTV lovingly covers the pre-history of the network and its first few moments. (The first video played by MTV was, fittingly enough, The Buggle’s “Video Killed the Radio Star”. MTV Europe began with an even more appropriate clip, Dire Strait’s “Money for Nothing”) Then it’s America’s infatuation with Michael Jackson, Madonna, video clips, and MTV… But the book covers roughly fifteen years, and that’s just enough time for more than a success story. MTV briefly faltered in the late-eighties, as it realized that it could be only “FM radio with pictures”, but had to re-invent itself as a true channel with more to offer.

    This is not a press-release book, nor is it a superficial look at a pop phenomenon. The writing is informative, witty and occasionally very funny. But McGrath has done his research, and the end result is truly a good look at MTV. Even the carefully-wild graphic layout respects the content and tries to spice up the rest. It’s a shame, for such a visual subject, that there couldn’t be more photos, and that the ones that are printed are limited to a bichrome palette.

    In a nutshell, MTV simply accomplishes what it set out to do: Give a good and thorough history of MTV as well as make it clear that the impact of the television channel was significant on more than simply popular music. I was convinced, and that’s all I need to say.

  • The Warrior’s Apprentice, Lois McMaster Bujold

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Baen, 1986 (1988 reprint), 315 pages, C$2.95 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-65587-6

    In almost four years of steady book reviewing, I have somehow managed to avoid talking about Lois McMaster Bujold’s work. This oversight is inexplicable given that I’ve never read anything by Bujold that I haven’t liked. I’ve even had the chance to meet her in 1997, at Montreal’s Con*Cept SF convention (I unknowingly transgressed normal con-going etiquette by asking her to autograph a book while she was browsing the art show. Fortunately, she was gracious enough to sign my paperback copy of Mirror Dance with a smile.) So, allow me to use this review of The Warrior’s Apprentice as a general rave about her work.

    Lois McMaster Bujold is not exactly at the cutting edge of science-fiction. Her books contain few original ideas, her future is comfortably extrapolated according to the old-style rules (no pervasive nanotech, no real infotech impact, etc…) and -if you want to get downright nasty- many of her stories could comfortably be told in fantasy, romance or contemporary settings.

    But that is belittling Bujold’s considerable skills. What she lacks in terms of innovation, she compensate by creating some of the most realistic and sympathetic characters in the genre. Her writing is simple, yet elegant and powerful. Her plotting is meticulously paced to keep the reader racing forward. While her worldview is characteristically positive (the good guys invariably win), she doesn’t hold back on the punishment her heroes have to endure in order to triumph.

    Most of her stories are set in one single universe and feature the same set of characters. This provides her with the opportunity to build one comprehensive universe, and to move her characters across arcs that would be impossible to complete in one single novel. Contrarily to other multi-book universes, hers holds together amazingly well, and seems more logical than most.

    The Warrior’s Apprentice is, from real-world chronology, the first book to star Miles Vorkosigan, the tortured hero of most of her cycle. Published in 1986, it was her second novel, but it remains as good as her latter efforts. Ultra-intelligent Miles is introduced and brilliantly wins both his battles and the reader’s undying sympathy. After all, who else can fail his military academy exams and yet manage to build up a mercenary fleet?

    Despite a few slight flaws here and there (it needed a bit more clarity in some spots, and maybe some fleshing out of the mercenaries), it’s very hard to dislike this novel. Not only is it compulsively readable, but the characters are all-around winners. Miles Vorkosigan’s superior tactical skills could be insufferable if they weren’t balanced by some wickedly funny self-depreciating internal monologue: A typical SF superhero with an atypical lack of pretentiousness. The other characters are well-handled and also made suitably sympathetic. Bujold not only writes good stories, but also has the knack of building up to great scenes. The Warrior’s Apprentice mixes coming-of-age episodes with space battles and one final great courtroom scene in a whole that’s just satisfying.

    After that, it’s no wonder to see Bujold regularly nominated for the fan-selected Hugo awards, and to read some rabidly devoted comments by Usenet fans. She deserves all of it. Though maybe not imaginative enough to be an essential part of the SF panorama, the works of Lois McMaster Bujold are nevertheless worth some attention. And you could do worse but to try The Warrior’s Apprentice as an introduction.